Quicken does not use historical currency rates when creating reports, why? Can not do taxes.

PG_1125

The Quicken reports are all in correct. I purchased the home/business Canadian version and can not run my business year end reports. My business has a US portfolio of 60 stocks and I need to track the exact currency conversion on the day the stock was purchased to the day it is sold. Also, commissions need to be tracked the day they are posted. Quicken currently only uses "today's" currency rate when generating reports. This is completely unacceptable by Revenue Canada. We need to use the currency rate for the date of the transaction. When will this be corrected in the Home/Business Canadian Window version?

Chris_QPW

When I saw that while doing a beta for the Canadian version I definitely wondered why they didn't use the historical prices for the net worth graphing and such since they do have the currency rate history.

But I'm betting that for tax purposes it wouldn't right anyways.

Note I'm in the US and using the US version.  In the US version it doesn't even have a currency exchange history, only the current exchange rate.  So it is even farther behind on this.

The reason I doubt that this makes a difference though on getting reports for taxes is twofold.

The first is that unlike the security markets where you can say "give me the price at close", currency exchange rates are constantly changing.  So what is the "official" rate for the day?

The second part of this is that at least for the IRS when dealing with a security they don't care at all about the "closing price" they need the prices for the buy and sell.  I would assume that would be true for currency rates too.  The numbers you need for taxes isn't the "currency history" it is the rate at what a given transaction was performed at.

I know that there have been other Canadian users talking about this very fact.  As in how they could find the exchange rate for a given transaction or such, which Quicken doesn't make have any report of or such.

Personally I gave up long ago on believing that I could transfer information from Quicken to a tax program and have any kind of success in doing that.  I tried early on and found I was spending much more time trying to get one number to import correctly than it would have for me to enter it manually.  And for the most part Quicken wasn't the "official source" in the first place.  If I got a form from a broker that said the amount is one thing and Quicken disagreed, I can't just put in what Quicken says.  The broker reports that number to the IRS.  I would have to convince the broker that their number is wrong (which has never been the case, it Quicken's number that is wrong), and get them to send both me and the IRS an updated form.  I use Quicken only as a "double check".

PG_1125

Hi and thank you for your answer.
The truth is, that all investment reports in quicken are all incorrect. One can not use the reports at all if dealing in multiple currencies. It seems there might be some false advertising Quicken toots multiple currencies.....

Also, there currently is a very large broker that has had to reissue Trading Summary reports due to incorrect currency valuations. At first the broker did not wish to do anything, but when everyone started pushing back, the broker had to redo everyone's accounts/reports. Errors do happen, even in the mega firms.

I have been using Quicken for almost 30 years. I think it is a great program other than the exchange rate issue.

What I do not understand is as follows: Quickbooks carries the foreign exchange rate through the entire program, throughout history, at the date that the transaction was posted. The reports never switch the dollar values to the current day's exchange rate. I have been using this program for over 20 years. So why does Quicken have such a difficult time with this issue? I believe both companies started under the same umbrella, so there should be transfer of knowledge within the conglomerate.

Quicken needs to address this issue and fix the problem. I truly do not believe that this is a difficult fix. It should be relatively easy. The calculations are stored in the history database, as are all inputted values and the reports pull from that database.

I believe that Quicken can and should fix this area of their program.

Chris_QPW

Well both programs have quite a different history and design goals.  Quickbooks might have even started out with multiple currency support whereas if you look at the earliest versions of Quicken it didn't.  Even when Quicken US and Quicken Canadian were the same code, you choose at install time which you wanted.  So they both had just one currency.  Then in time they "grafted" in on.  And then they got to a point where the branched off Quicken Canadian.   And it is clear that more time was spent on improving its multiple currency support, but clearly even it isn't "fully multiple currency".  Quicken Mac has even less than Quicken Windows US.

And you can also tell that in fact whereas overtime Quickbooks got more development (probably because of the cost of the product and it lining up with what Intuit saw as its market place), Quicken was actually "reduced" in scope.  At one time (up to 2004) Intuit was even licensing Quicken out to be supported in other countries.  That is all gone now with the exception of Canadian and the Australian version from Reckon, which isn't even called Quicken anymore and charges a large amount for a product that doesn't even get new features, just support of what has had in it since about 2009.

So in a nutshell I would say the main reason that this area hasn't been touched is because that isn't where the company sees most of it customers want improvement.

These days there are more complaints about not supporting cryptocurrencies anything to do with multiple currencies even in the US version that doesn't even have an exchange rate history.